Week 10: Response to Content

What exactly is Cyberpunk? And Who are Cyberpunk‘s’?

 

The word Cyberpunk is taken from the words cybernetics and punk:

Using Google's Dictionary tool

·         Cybernetics;

noun (plural) /ˌsībərˈnetiks/ 

The science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things, and

• Punk  

adjective /pəNGk/

A loud, fast-moving, and aggressive form of rock music, popular in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with an anarchist, political philosophy and a DIY, anti-expert, ‘seize the day’ approach to life.

Cyberpunk is a postmodernist perspective of the technological advances in society and how they influence people and life. Cyberpunk is ‘a genre of science fiction set in an imminent, computerised and information-governed world. Cyberpunk centers around an alternative post-industrial culture predicated on the interface of biotechnologically enhanced human bodies, interactive information technology, and omniscient corporate power’ (Novotny, P 1997).

Christian As. Kirtchev created a Cyberpunk Website and a manifesto for the cyberpunk community or ‘sub-culture.’ Here he describes cyberpunk as a style or almost a way of being, which is backed up by many of his cyberpunk peers. “We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks. We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.’ Christian and his peers describe themselves as a younger generation of technologically packed individuals, outcasts from ‘normal’ society, strange, loners (most friends are on the net), with a dream of freedom; claiming that the current society that we live in denies itself of the information and new ways of doing things that cyberpunks have the ability to perpetuate. 

Sources:

 - Novotny, P 1997, Political Science Fiction: No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration, viewed 4 October 2011.

<http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QyKkrxd80CUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA99&dq=cyberpunk+and+society&ots=Hwh8dA0_xC&sig=lbAjLWXFHUJh_PsVkCgb2RADc2U#v=onepage&q=cyberpunk%20and%20society&f=false>

 - Kirtchev, C 2005, A Cyberpunk Manifesto, viewed 4 October 2011.

<http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_manifesto.html>

 - Urban Fantasy, Cyberpunk Elven Trilogy, Elves, Elfpunk, n.d., image, viewed 4 October 2011.

<http://elventrilogy.wordpress.com/cyberpunk/> 

 - Amos: This man is your friend, he fights for freedom, n.d., image, viewed 4 October 2011.

<http://www.myspace.com/somasen>